The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.
I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
I feel very connected to poets across the country.
I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.